BTW, I don’t think Jesus wanted men to be “in charge”. He had women friends that He loved and hung out with, and in the early church, women were just as likely to be leaders, to host house churches, to be prophets, and so on. In the original Greek, the New Testament refers to deaconesses, or female leaders. Yet later, in the King James translation, interpretations were changed to downplay female authority. I’ve had ministers who know Hebrew and Greek talk about this and point out the original words. These are the same ministers who support female leadership in the church.

They will also point out a passage in the NT that says “Before God there is no male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek” which means that God doesn’t care about gender, socioeconomic status or race. In the early church, it was almost communist. Rich people donated money and poor people were taken care of. Everyone was supposed to care for each other. In some ways Jesus was the original hippie. He smashed the power structures and treated everyone equally, which is one reason He was crucified.

One minister I spoke to about male and female equality told me — it’s suggestive that God created woman AFTER man, since the whole progression in Genesis is towards ever more complex and highly evolved beings. So if we’re going to follow the logic, that would indicate women are more evolved then men…

Going with other religious traditions, in early Hinduism, each god was paired with a goddess and in the earliest texts the god and goddess were roughly equal. It’s only later that gods get more and more importance and goddesses eventually just become consorts. This is the same with many other traditions… I think it’s an alarming trend.

Anyway, sorry for the data dump. :-)